So therefore a person with perfect knowledge would not need probability. Is this another interpretation of “God does not play dice?” :-)
Ian_C.
Eliezer, I’m sure if you complete your friendly AI design, there will be multiple honorary PhDs to follow.
Reminds me of this: “Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”
But my question would be: Is the universe of cause and effect really so less safe than the universe of God? At least in this universe, someone who has an evil whim is limited by the laws of cause and effect, e.g. Hitler had to build tanks first, which gave the allies time to prepare. In that other universe, Supreme Being decides he’s bored with us and zap we’re gone, no rules he has to follow to achieve that outcome.
So why is relying on the goodness of God safer than relying on the inexorability of cause and effect?
“I understood that you could do everything that you were supposed to do, and Nature was still allowed to kill you.”
You finally realized inanimate objects can’t be negotiated with… and then continued with your attempt to rectify this obvious flaw in the universe :)
When someone says X is Y “by definition,” the fundamental mistake they are making is thinking that the definition decides what belongs in a particular concept. No, the similarity between the objects relative to those around them (as recognized by our brain) is what decides.
The definition is just a reminder, a mental tool to help us keep the sets separate and organized within the context of our knowledge. Due to this, the definition can change as our knowledge grows, and we have the need to make finer separations. But the set doesn’t change.
(Definitions also serve a role in human communication.)
If you believe in G-d then you believe in a being that can change reality just by willing it. So therefore you believe it’s possible for consciousness to change/control existence.
So that could explain why Guardians fear too many non-believers: they feel threatened by what they perceive as the power of other people’s consciousness. They fear that if there are too many non-believers that it might change the truth somehow.
But scientists (Seekers) know that reality is what it is regardless of what other people think, so they don’t ascribe so much power to their fellow beings, and therefore don’t feel as threatened by them.
The last sentence is the King pointing out to the Jester that all the reasoning in the world is no good if it is based on false premises, in this case the false presumption was that the text on the boxes was truthful.
One advantage of the Two Party Swindle is that swing-voters usually decide an election. That is, the small percent of people who don’t fall for Us vs. Them.
So though it may be designed to distract the populace while their purse is being lightened, the Swindle also results in the more unbiased voter having more influence (even though on paper it’s still one man, one vote).
“I THINK that’s what you’re saying...”
I think it is saying that if you want to know if an idea is true or not, compare it to reality. Clothes are an irrelevancy. “If it can drive nails, who can doubt it’s worth?”
‘I found my most productive fifteen minutes were when a friend said, out of nowhere, “want to see who can do the most work in 15 minutes?”’
That’s interesting, because historically great works have been accomplished when a group of really talented people get together in the same place (e.g. Florence, Silicon Valley, Manhattan Project).
The Internet is great in that it enables you to find like minded people and bounce ideas of them. But that’s only half the achievement puzzle. The other half is pestering each other to work, which the Internet is not so good for.
Except the universe doesn’t care how much backbreaking effort you make, only if you get the cause and effect right. Which is why cultures that emphasize hard work are not overtaking cultures that emphasize reason (Enlightenment cultures). Of course even these cultures must still do some work, that of enacting their cleverly thought out causes.
“Maybe you should just do that?”
Heck, hell with physics too. Let’s just make up all human knowledge. If we’re going to invent the prescriptive, why not the descriptive too?
“It is always, always more important to look for what has gone wrong than to recognize what is correct.”
Yes—as long as you are attacking the main thrust of the argument, not some insignificant side issue. People have a right to be annoyed when others constantly ignore the main part of what they are saying on instead pick on them for getting some triviality wrong.
And this medium is not an academic volume, it’s more informal than that, so people will publish incomplete thoughts and/or grasping attempts to understand new things, and posts should be read in that context, not as if you are critiquing a journal article.
Maybe to be beautiful, art has to have a sense of balance and proper proportion, but a political fanatic has very little of either of these.
While I totally agree with the sentiment of Eliezer’s prayer, I don’t think saying a prayer on Thanksgiving makes you religious or even implies a belief in God—it’s just tradition. It’s harmless to follow traditions as long as you are epistemologically strong enough not to be in any danger of confusing reality and myth. Just like it’s safe for a person with very strong reason to read a lot of fiction.
Could this be a Jewish or American cultural thing? I know in English culture great scientists are highly regarded but they are very much still men. There’s praise but it’s not effusive or reverential.
The screwy concept in “Why does anything exist at all?” is not existence, it is “why.” There’s nothing wrong with “why” as such, it just doesn’t apply to existence. That’s what makes for wrong questions: pairing up words that don’t apply to each other, such as “What is the sound of blue?”
“Why” only applies when there is an alternative that could have been, but nothingness can’t be (as soon as it tries it becomes something) so there’s no alternative to existence.
An approximation is something less accurate than the original. 100 looks less accurate because it looks like it’s been rounded to the hundreds column.
The emotion of religious faith might just be a feeling of intense admiration originally evolved to be directed at other human beings, but hijacked by religion.
I think the two box person is confused about what it is to be rational, it does not mean “make a fancy argument,” it means start with the facts, abstract from them, and reason about your abstractions.
In this case if you start with the facts you see that 100% of people who take only box B win big, so rationally, you do the same. Why would anyone be surprised that reason divorced from facts gives the wrong answer?